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Free Solo - documentary review

Freedom means a lot of different things to people.  For a self confessed, bohemian, free spirit who grew up in an intellectual household, Alex Honnold wanted to soar free of his earthly shackles and go up.  As in go up climbing rocks and walls that would faze most people on earth.

The daring is not so much in climbing magnificently large boulders or rock surfaces as much as doing it without the aid of any ropes or harness or safety equipment.  Man, nature's most advanced creation scaling walls made over eons by nature grinding away in its own slow rhythm with nothing between them.

Free Solo is an amazing adventure tracing the free solo attempts of a rock climber called Alex Honnold and shot on film by director, producer husband and wife team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai.

The culmination of Alex's journey up various challenging vertical surfaces through the film ends in his scaling a 3,000 feet slab of granite located in the Yosemite National Park in California, called El Capitan.

El Cap as it is known in the climber community is the largest monolith on earth and literally means the Chief.  Alex climbed this without any protective gear whatsoever except the shirt on his back and a powder bag hanging off his ass in approximately four hours in 2017.  That event was filmed for posterity by Jimmy and his crew of professional climber, photographers in an epic documentation event and released for audiences in IMAX.  In that it was an excellent demonstration of amazingly synchronized team work where each cameraman also had his role cut out and they all did what is unique to provide edge of your seat entertainment for audiences.

To paraphrase Bruce Willis' character in the fictional, action film franchise, called  'Die Hard', "we are not huggers" is a phrase that Alex mentions about his family growing up.  That part of Alex is remarkable and captured candidly when his girlfriend also asks about why he is doing what he is doing and he categorically discusses how he does not feel obliged to himself or anyone else to live the longest he can.  Rather he seems to live by the mantra of living to the fullest.  In that he so far has definitely managed it.

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